


Toast

by twofrontteethstillcrooked



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Breakfast, Crack, Fluff, M/M, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-12-03 04:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/694045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofrontteethstillcrooked/pseuds/twofrontteethstillcrooked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Steve had left the bedroom at 4:45 a.m., Tony was not wearing those pajamas. Steve knew that much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toast

**Author's Note:**

> You know how, in the slog of writing something longer and darker, you decide you want to dash off something short and sweet whilst tossing back an amazing/appalling number of fresh-from-the-fryer Krispy Kremes? Um. It's not that I'm blaming the Krispies, but they are devilish crack. ::licks icing off lid of donut box::
> 
> [ETA] Enormous thanks to js for awesome run-on-sentence wrangling! :-D
> 
> [ETA 2] Though I'm actually sort of tickled by the original version's completely insane June weather -- too hot to breathe one morning and snowing by the next, because pete knows the weather in my corner of the globe has been weird as hell this summer -- I made a couple of very small changes to make NYC's weather a tad less ridiculous. (Updated 26 July 2013)

Eight nights in a row Steve had gone to bed satisfied -- 'resigned to' might be the better phrase -- with the day's progress and awakened wrong again, like he'd been reset, like they'd just chipped him out of the ice. The staff therapist who sometimes worked off the Helicarrier mentioned once that grief, readjustments, and coping with trauma were true long-term undertakings, deep ops, dicey, without tidy, easily reached resolutions. That sounded very sensible, and some mornings just thinking about it made Steve want to put his head through the tower gym's cement floor.

"Fancy seeing you here," Tony said. "Huh. How many's that make today?" 

Steve did not stop unwinding the fighter's tape off his fingers, and did not look over. "Seven," he said, when he knew he could speak without giving anything else away. "But one of them was starting to split yesterday." 

The mangled punching bags were slumped together by the wall like dirty laundry. Steve had already swept up most of the sand; some still crunched under his feet, though, and he'd find it in every orifice when he took a bath. He'd been doing better about using other outlets for his frustrations in general, but, and he hadn't thought this was possible for him, June's abnormal triple digit temperatures had made it too hot for walks, motorcycle rides, or almost anything else outdoors to be enjoyable at present, and anyway SHIELD wanted them to stay in town in case the ceasefire with the Baluurian rebels didn't hold. So: the tower gym. 

"Want to talk about it?" Tony asked. He didn't look at Steve either. But he didn't have to, Steve reasoned. They both knew Steve had been about as pleasant as a tropical parasite of late.

"Nope." 

Tony lobbed a miniscule plastic container at him, and it landed beside Steve's gloves. Next he proffered a plate Steve recognized from the shared kitchen upstairs. 

"Burnt like you like 'em. Thank Thor for the jam; he filched a bunch from that Cracker Barrel we were at in Tulsa with the, you know, the things with the horns." Tony offered him a butter knife, handle first, and a napkin. 

Steve took them both. "Your turn again?"

"Yes. We took a vote. Omelets lost four to two. Not that I would've minded making two."

"Miserable out already."

"There's a reason I went to the trouble of inventing insanely efficient clean energy for this place. Well. Multiple reasons."

Steve counted up teammates in his head. "Six votes? Who else is in-house today?"

"Coulson," Tony said. "He and Clint have that symposium with Richards at the Baxter at 11. How to Get Your Villains Their Shiniest or whatever." Steve nodded, remembering. "Hey, Bruce says he's making chilaquiles tomorrow, barring another assignment. They're really good -- you should start working on your excuse now if you want anyone to believe you're not joining us because of those."

Steve suppressed a response by tending to his toast. It was multi grain with sunflower seeds and shed black crumbs when he spread on the preserves and bit down. Perfect crispness, char bitter beneath the tart sweetness of the blackberries. 

After one slice was gone, he said, "I'm not." He wiped his mouth, began again. "I'm not avoiding you guys on purpose. You don't have to keep feeding me, like I'm the one who's going to forget to eat." Steve hated the petulant note in his voice.

"Yeah, no, I know." If Tony was in any way insulted, he wasn't showing it. "You were ten floors away. No big." Tony leaned against the gym door and worked on his own slice of toast, which was slathered in Nutella. 

Steve took a long draw off his water bottle. Eight days in a row he had been brought breakfast by a man who previously went weeks without consuming as much as one square meal a day, who had given a lengthy soliloquy about how a bag of Skittles might constitute a serving of fruit. Sure, they were crawling around a half-collapsed Parisian catacomb then -- while that Duval nutjob threw a hissy fit on the 14th arrondissement square and tried to turn the French prime minister into a statue again -- and oxygen was running low, but still. All their lives were in danger frequently, but no one's as much as Tony's. Tony was probably at risk for scurvy, for pity's sake. And Steve had been nothing but a moody piece of work for over a week. 

Yet here Tony was, Steve thought, and something in his chest felt like a fist unclenching slowly. 

**Six months later**

"Aw, bacon." Steve finished stirring cream into his coffee. Clint was sighing and somewhat creakily picking up a still-sizzling strip of escaped bacon off the tile. It was the third thing Clint had dropped since volunteering for breakfast duty. 

"Maybe someone should take the skillet of hot grease away from him," Bruce murmured without looking up from the little screen he was tapping on. 

"I'm fine," Clint said in a put-upon tone. "Everything's fine." 

It was early for any of them to be up. Steve was usually fully rested after three hours of shut eye, but he had the body for that kind of turn around. 

"Nothing we can help you with?" he asked, wanting to be useful, to have something to do besides thinking...about that thing he was trying not to think about. 

"Nah." 

Steve considered some recent team breakfasts. The mega-waffle iron blaze had been unfortunate (thank goodness for Dummy's hair trigger with extinguishers), Steve's Crockpot oatmeal divisive at best ("Don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like I've been chewing this mouthful since the dawn of time," Clint noted), and Natasha showed up with ten dozen donuts on a morning Thor was briefly but upsettingly trapped in Asgard (alas, Loki). Which was expensive, probably? Though maybe she expensed it to SHIELD. Or maybe she'd just sensed Hulk would be around later, and he had been (alas, Loki). Hulk was messier than a small appliance fire, but he could polish off seventy two honey-glazed cruellers in a matter of minutes. 

"I could make eggs. There's enough room for both of us to work, right?" Steve asked Clint. 

The professional grade range was, rumor had it, a pet project of Fury's, built with an usually fast cooking oven which utilized three types of heat with proprietary SHIELD technology. Additionally, it was large enough you could darn near spit a whole boar on top of it. They'd all assumed it would be the first thing Thor would try to do his inaugural turn at breakfast, to the point a SHIELD lackey had been given the specific assignment of ensuring there was a breathtaking variety of toaster pastries in the cabinets at all times. 

But no, Thor had fixed them buttermilk biscuits and sawmill gravy from recipes Darcy taught him -- Jane watching, equally transfixed since, quote, "Does warming up frozen pizza in the microwave count as cooking? If it does, then, yes, I am a great chef" -- and it was Bruce who'd shown up one morning with an enormous amount of goat to curry. No one'd had the courage to inquire where he, or possibly Hulk, had procured so much meat. 

"Relax, Cap." Clint was cracking eggs single handed into a bowl. "Frittata's on its way." 

Steve put his coffee cup down on the oblong kitchen table with intentional patience. Natasha was sorting through a stack of files Bruce had requested, not paying any obvious attention to Steve at all. The dark red swoop down her jaw, he saw, was not a piece of hair but a deep scratch. From last night's adventures, he presumed, and tried not to sigh. 

"No, it doesn't need stitches," she said. 

Before Steve could respond, a *pop* sounded from the vicinity of the stove, and Clint said about nine curse words in four different languages. 

Natasha said, "I taught him that last one," sounding proud. 

"Please tell me this is just juice," Tony said from the doorway, staring down at the floor and frowning. 

"Oh yeah," Clint said. "Sorry." 

Steve stood up from the table to fetch paper towels. How Clint had spilled orange juice twenty feet away from the counter area where he'd poured said juice was a mystery. 

Tony leaned against the doorjamb with his eyes closed, and Steve discreetly looked him over while wiping up the puddle. There was an x-shaped pillow crease across Tony's cheek; his pajama pants were twisted oddly at the waist and hitched up at one knee, and the top was buttoned incorrectly. His hair was sticking up more than usual, and he was only wearing one sock. 

Which was the second thing that puzzled Steve, because he would've sworn he'd taken off both of Tony's socks. 

"Captain Rogers," Tony said, not opening his eyes, "why did you put me in these godawful pajamas?" 

Clint made a noise like a cackle he'd thought better of too late; at least, Steve hoped it was Clint who'd made it, and not himself. To add to his burgeoning dismay, on closer inspection Steve realized the faint print on the pale blue cotton fabric was not, as first assumed, tiny green spades, as might be depicted on a pack of playing cards, but were instead tiny paw prints. Like the type wee tiny green kittens might leave behind. 

"The better question is, are you actually awake?" Bruce asked as Tony flopped down on the nearby couch, arm flung over his face. 

"I'm not," Tony said, voice hoarse. "I'm not even here. I am but a figment of your imagination." 

"No, no," Natasha said, "I think the best question is, Cap, why did you put Stark in _Pepper's_ godawful pjs?" 

Tony groaned quietly. 

Steve ran through a number of responses in his mind and discarded them. When he'd left the bedroom at 4:45 a.m., Tony was not wearing those pajamas. Steve knew that much. On penalty of death he was not going to say that out loud.

Although, upon reflection, the pajamas in question didn't seem any more bizarre than anything else he had seen or been involved with in the preceding twenty-four hours, including using his shield to deflect a bolt of Thor's lightning purposefully into the terrifying Jello-like face of a nightmare-box-wielding Hell-Lord wannabe calling herself Thogga. Hell-Lady, Steve corrected in his head. Thogga's head, were anyone to ask, had made a completely disgusting splooshing noise when it exploded. 

"I did think they seemed a bit...small," Steve offered gradually. A reasonable statement for a reasonable situation. And of course Tony would still have a drawer of Pepper's stuff; the team would understand that. To be technical about it, the whole tower was Pepper's stuff. Tony had not taken the break up five months ago with an overabundance of grace, but he wasn't the type to throw a bureau's worth of women's clothing out a 90-story window in anger/jealousy/drunkenness. 

(Okay, yes, he was. He hadn't, though, which Steve chose to believe was a promising sign of maturity.) 

(Besides which, they saw Pepper on a regular basis, and often she ran Stark Industries from one floor below where they were this very minute, and she was Pepper. It was fine. If she ever wanted her pajamas back, she knew where to find them.) 

Steve was aware Natasha perhaps wanted a more thorough answer, but Natasha wasn't usually nosey like that, unless... Oh, god, he had admitted knowledge of the pajama situation. And how long had it been since anyone else had said anything? 

"Captain, do you require assistance?" Thor had arrived and was using his indoor I Am a Benevolent Demigod Prince voice, the one he deployed when they were trying to rescue skittish elderly grandmothers from apartment complexes his own brother had toppled. 

Steve blinked and realized he was still kneeling, soggy paper towels under his hand. Bruce looked over at him and quirked an eyebrow. Steve got the distinct impression Bruce wanted to chuckle but was too polite to. He held out the paper towels to Thor, who took them without comment and threw them away. Steve straightened up, deliberately did not look at Tony, and sat back down at the table. 

"Fifteen minutes to chow," Clint said, snapping the oven door shut. 

"Help me carry these down to the lab?" Bruce asked Natasha. The two of them gathered up the file folders, Clint grabbed a large duffel from under Bruce's chair, and they all filtered out to the elevator. Thor drank the last of the chocolate milk -- i.e. three-quarters of a gallon -- and stared out the huge windows at the brightening sky. 

"Though I am not sure I trust their judgment, your weather prognosticators say there may be heavy rain in a few hours," he said. 

Tony gave another strangled Oscar-worthy little groan. 

"Did you have plans?" Steve asked him, trying for a neutral tone of voice. 

Tony didn't answer, and the rareness of his reticence -- on pretty much any topic -- must have alerted Thor to some larger issue at hand because he tipped his head at both of them in a curious way. Or maybe, Steve thought, scratching his ear, everyone on earth, Midgard, home planet, whatever you wanted to call it, maybe everyone everywhere just knew. Fury, Pepper, Hydra, that agent who stocked the cabinets with Pop Tarts, probably even Loki knew, the louse. 

He couldn't imagine what Thor saw on his face. Maybe he was going to have to get used to things much more quickly than he'd planned. 

(Things? Planned? Things was not at all the right word, and there had been no planning. None whatsoever.) 

(Yes, okay, he and Tony were-- Which is to say, they had been-- And lately they'd been circling around-- He meant, they were teammates-- They were acquaintances-- Friends, in a roundabout way, really very, very different people, but friendly sometimes--) 

Thor's Starkphone trilled, sparing Steve from having to say something to fill the expanding silence. Thor answered, jovial as ever, and sidled down the hallway to talk with more privacy to the caller who was clearly Jane. 

In the oven, the frittata made faint hissing sounds and smelled like a state fair. Steve took a deep breath and rubbed the back of his neck. He felt rather than saw Tony's scrutiny and turned around. May as well concede...whatever it was he was conceding. 

Because, when he really thought about it, he wasn't embarrassed. Er, per se. He walked over to the couch and sat down beside Tony. That pant leg was still scrunched up at the knee, and Tony's hair still looked like he'd put his head in the blender Thor used for strawberry-n-spinach smoothies. 

Steve didn't think of himself as the kind of person who'd step right into somebody who hadn't punched him first, but he was with Tony; he did not think he knew how not to be. Tony drove him crazy, every kind of crazy, like no-one he'd ever met. He splintered something under Steve's skin like a fever dream he couldn't shake. And last night after weeks of he and Steve getting further and further into each other's personal space, a half dozen increasingly stressful team assignments involving things like megalomaniacal lunatic aliens and gigantic possessed android mimes, and no fewer than seven pancake cook-offs, Steve, who at one point in the evening had been covered in Hell-Lady gelatin entrails, had kissed Tony in the cozy yellow glow of a nightlight in Tony's cavernous bedroom like his life depended on it. 

He'd done it because Tony looked so tired, and breakable. Because Thogga had tried to open her nightmare-box on them when they were corned right before Hulk and Thor broke through a gallery wall. The idea of that box filled Steve with crushing dread. He could not bear to think what would have been in it for him, Bucky slipping and falling ever away, Peggy's tear-choked voice through a bad connection, a sealed, frozen sarcophagus; and Tony had looked at him once through the smoke of the fight, eyes dark, and Steve knew Tony was weighed down with the same kind of fear, and Steve thought, oh, we are so gone, so damaged already. 

He'd kissed Tony because Tony's hands shook just a little as he tried to wrench off a dented piece of the suit's torso, Steve helping, and Tony braced a hand on his arm, and neither of them had said a word since the quick debrief and ride back to the tower and the stillness was starting to eat Steve's brain; because Tony's mouth-- 

Because Tony's mouth. 

No, Steve thought, I am not even a little bit sorry. 

He might not be the best at figuring out what to do next, though. A few hours ago the first kiss had ended and Tony looked as dumbstruck as Steve felt; Steve had Tony pinned against a wall, his thumb gently tracking a thin bruise at Tony's left eyebrow. Steve's possibly half-eaten mind seemed to be saying, all right, you've got a man here who needs some sleep. Open a drawer. Put him to bed. Pajamas. 

Oh, for there being no plan, such a plan it seemed. They started laughing slap happy, borderline hysterical laughter. Not that they would disturb anyone else in a tower this enormous, only that they were trying to _stop laughing_ , were pulling Tony's undershirt over his head and then there were drawstrings and those dumb buttons. "One leg at a time, soldier," Steve said, and Tony tripped backwards, falling to the bed he was laughing so hard -- real laughter, like joy -- which was maybe how one of his socks ended up in Steve's hand? And then Steve was nipping at Tony's throat with his hands on Tony's stomach, and Tony fisted his hand in Steve's t-shirt and tugged him down on the bed with him and kissed him back and kissed him back-- 

The elevator gears were winding up and the oven timer was ticking. Tony sat up, angled against Steve's shoulder. 

Steve ventured, "So, last night." He swallowed, reached out, unbuttoned two buttons on the cursed pajama top and rebuttoned them quick-like in the right holes, steady hands, didn't peek at Tony's face once, casual, no big. He spoke quietly. "You could've told me these were Pepper's. I mean, I should've guessed, size-wise, although they would be enormous on her, why would she even own a pair this big? And _why_ did you put them on?"

"Seriously," Tony said, "I had to put something on to walk out here, and I'll admit I wanted to see what you'd do--" 

"Also, I don't know exactly what this was all about--" 

Tony was smirking now. "The fucking?"

Steve took a beat. "The pajamas." 

Tony wiped a hand over his face, obviously trying to be tolerant. "You know, you seemed like a man on a mission," he said. "It would have been rude to interrupt." 

"Tony--" 

"I was distracted," Tony said, looking at Steve's mouth like he had exhaustive strategies regarding it. "You were very, very distracting, and I. I didn't want to say her name out loud, you know?" 

Ah. There it was. Steve felt like he'd stepped out onto a very thin skyscraper ledge and a cold blast of air had rushed up to greet him. 

But Tony grabbed his wrist, saying, "No, don't misunderstand. It wasn't. Pepper is, was, is, she's fantastic. But you were kissing me, laughing and kissing me, and I just--" 

The elevator dinged. 

"--I didn't want you to stop." He held Steve's gaze for a long measure. "It was a great idea, though. These pjs are super comfy." For a second Steve let himself appreciate how well Tony could balance sounding both sarcastic and sincere. I am doomed, Steve thought. The elevator doors were opening. "And confidentially," Tony whispered, "none of my plans for the next twenty four to forty eight hours involve going out in the rain." His smile was small and private, and a very hot, hungry sensation washed through Steve as he took it in. 

The elevator coughed up Bruce and Clint, and then Thor was opening the fridge for more milk. Clint swung the frittata gingerly out of the oven and hummed while rummaging for a knife. Natasha came in from the stairwell with a different stack of files. Thor poured coffees, and gave Steve's refreshed mug back to him like it was any other morning. Bruce divvied up the bacon on six plates. All in all it was, Steve thought, shaping up to be a good breakfast, a good day, even. 

He finally thought of something to say, Tony's hand still warm on his wrist. "Anyone want toast?"


End file.
